Released today in 1986: I’m All You Need

Jive FOXY4

It was Samantha Fox’s childhood dream to be a pop star, but despite being a household name before the age of 20 her attempts to break into the music industry repeatedly failed for some three years before she finally had a hit. “Since I was a little girl I used to go to drama school and I learnt to sing and I used to do lots of plays so I always wanted to be a singer. I always wanted to be a model as well but now I can be a singer and a model but everyone says it’s not credible. Whatever you’re tops in, people are going to try and bring you down – that’s my philosophy,” she told Tom Hibbert when he interviewed her for Smash Hits. Unusually, the magazine took a rather lofty attitude towards her, with the contents page summarizing the article as “Britain’s foremost philosopher speak[ing] about Thatcher and the unions and God Almighty and floppy hats. Gosh!” (Well, it was her own fault for using the word ‘philosophy’.) Hibbert did indeed quiz her on these and other topics such as press intrusion and feminism and while his verbatim reporting of her answers was clearly intended to mock, she nevertheless gamely replied to all his questions. She readily expected people to dismiss her music. “As long as I’m pleased with the record and I’ve done my best, then I know that all that’s let me down is this Page Three image. But then again it’s 1986, not the 1920s – anything goes these days,” she said.

With that, she acknowledged what had brought her to public attention initially: glamour modelling. The fame this brought her in turn led to a record deal with the small Lamborghini label, but her early records sold poorly. The first was the reasonably inoffensive new wave Rockin’ With My Radio, released with her band SFX in 1983 (the year she made her debut as a Page Three girl in The Sun). Aim To Win, released under her own name, followed in 1984 but it flopped and that was it for the time being. Her modelling career continued and her image helped to sell other people’s records if not her own: she featured in the dreadful cover art for Hallmark compilation album The Top Of The Poppers – The Best Of Top Of The Pops, and the following year was photographed in an embrace with David Cassidy for the picture disc edition of his single Romance (Let Your Heart Go). By the end of that year, Fox had signed with Jive records and her new record company put together a comprehensive campaign to make her name as a singer during 1986.

Her label debut was the ghastly Touch Me (I Want Your Body), a deliberately seedy song title designed to secure maximum publicity. Despite its flimsy composition and the cringe-inducing moaning and heavy breathing liberally applied throughout, it made the Top 10, as did its far superior follow-up Do Ya Do Ya (Wanna Please Me), a fun (and unintentionally funny) pop/rock track which she did her best with. Of the song, she said “One morning, an envelope arrived with just ‘Samantha Fox, North London’ written on it. Inside was a cassette with the demo of this song, written by two unknown writers. I loved it instantly and it brought out the secret rocker in me.” Her vocal limitations meant she couldn’t quite do the song justice, although she had a respectable go at belting it out. Next was Hold On Tight, a truly awful rockabilly pastiche which was one of the worst records of the year. She followed that with the slower-paced I’m All You Need (“I love this. It has beautiful lyrics… it reminded me of Fleetwood Mac who I loved and still do.”), by some margin her best song and the highlight of the filler-heavy album from which all four of these singles were taken, Touch Me.

She remained a Top 40 artist for the rest of the decade, but there were few memorable songs. Her second, eponymously titled album was a professionally put together affair but it lacked a radio-friendly tune; the one Top 10 single that was included, Stock Aitken Waterman’s Nothing’s Gonna Stop Me Now, sat uncomfortably with the rest of the material and had obviously been bolted on when Jive realized there was no big hit to promote the album with in Europe. She actually had more luck with it in the US, where one of its tracks Naughty Girls (Need Love Too), written and produced by American soul/funk outfit Full Force (who also performed on it), reached #3. As a result, America got third LP I Wanna Have Some Fun first (in November 1988; it didn’t appear here for another few months). Stock Aitken Waterman and Full Force were both back, but again the album lacked a winning single; in the UK, the biggest hit was a cover of I Only Wanna Be With You. Jive seemed unable to decide how to market her: she was often portrayed as a wild-child, but in interviews she was keen to emphasize that she was just an ordinary young woman.

Thereafter, although her pop career has continued, her records have been infrequent and in the UK at least, unsuccessful. Full Force returned to produce the four ridiculously camp opening tracks on One More Night (1991), her final album for Jive. How she kept a straight face in the promotional clip for its lead single (Hurt Me! Hurt Me!) But The Pants Stay On is anyone’s guess. The album’s title track was presumably meant to be funny, so outrageous was its content, but it was promoted without any hint of irony. Regardless, both these songs and the other two Full Force contributed ended once and for all the pretence that she was a ‘girl-next-door’ type. She made brief returns to the singles chart here in 1995 as lead singer with all-female band Sox (Go For The Heart was a Eurovision hopeful, but didn’t get to represent the UK) and in 1998 as a guest vocalist on DJ Milano’s club hit Santa Maria. Final albums 21st Century Fox (1997, re-promoted in the millennium in question as Watching Me Watching You) and Angel With An Attitude (2005) failed to chart. Occasional one-off singles and collaborations have emerged over the past ten years.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Dec. 1
1986
Samantha FOX I’m All You Need (Jive FOXY4)
MADONNA Open Your Heart (Sire W8480)
PRETENDERS Hymn To Her (Real YZ93)

Released today in 1987: All Right Now

Polydor POSP896

Fun version of British blues rockers Free’s best-known song, which had been written at the end of the 1960s. Former Wham! backing vocalists Pepsi and Shirlie named their debut album as a duo after the song and chose it as their fourth single at the end of 1987. The year had got off to a good start for the girls, with their first two singles making the Top 10, but it was a case of beginners’ luck as they weren’t able to sustain this level of success. This single, for example, only made #50. But at least it was a hit, albeit a minor one: the follow-up fell a little short of the Top 75, and the one after that flopped. After that, they temporarily halted their career while Shirlie Holliman married Spandau Ballet’s bass player Martin Kemp and took a period of maternity leave when she gave birth to their daughter. She and Pepsi DeMacque recorded a second album a year or so later but it went almost entirely unnoticed, despite its lead single being written and produced by their former Wham! employer George Michael. They have occasionally reunited to perform together and record backing vocals (they were on Geri Halliwell’s 2000 #1, Bag It Up) but have no plans to release any more material themselves.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Nov. 30
1984
Ian McCULLOCH September Song (Korova KOW40)
Gary NUMAN My Dying Machine (Numa NU6)
SPANDAU BALLET Round And Round (Reformation SPAN6)
THOMPSON TWINS Lay Your Hands On Me (Arista TWINS6)
1987
The ALARM Rescue Me (IRS IRM150)
Rick ASTLEY When I Fall In Love (RCA PB41683)
MADONNA The Look Of Love (Sire W8115)
PEPSI AND SHIRLIE All Right Now (Polydor POSP896)
PET SHOP BOYS Always On My Mind (Parlophone R6171)
SINITTA G.T.O. (Fanfare FAN14)

Released today in 1989: Get Real

Renotone RENS001

What do you do when your first single has been a Top 10 hit, but your record company drops you? The Reynolds Girls’ solution was to get their father to launch a label of his own so they could release a follow-up.

The hit was I’d Rather Jack, released in early 1989 on Pete Waterman’s PWL label. That year arguably saw the song’s writers and producers, Stock Aitken Waterman, at the peak of their popularity. Certainly commercially this was true, but with strong revenue streams and nearly two dozen of hits there were bound to be some detractors. The main criticism was that Stock Aitken Waterman records were frivolous, shallow and throwaway, hardly ‘real’ music at all. Waterman said I’d Rather Jack was “inspired by a radio seminar I went to where everyone was banging on about demographics. I wanted to make a record that cocked a snook at that whole idea of the blanding out of youth culture, something that pricked the balloon of pomposity about having reverence for old rock bands. It was just a bit of fun….” Not everyone saw the funny side. PWL engineer Phil Harding said, “This record epitomized how bad it could get, and confirms to me that this year was the start of the PWL/SAW creative downfall. The record was awful – cheesy and corny beyond belief and I felt embarrassed to be associated with the building every time I heard it on the radio. I can’t explain it any better than that. Many others in the building felt the same about it, yet no one dared say anything about how horrible the record was, for fear of losing their job.”

The question of who should perform the song was apparently settled very casually. “I’d met the girls at a show and thought, we may as well use these two,” said Waterman of Liverpool sisters Linda and Aisling Reynolds. They had apparently handed him a demo tape they had made and asked him to produce them, so he did. “The record went flying up the charts but when The Reynolds Girls appeared on ‘Top Of The Pops’ they killed it stone dead. If it was Mel And Kim it would have been #1.” It might well have been, but then the song would have ended Mel And Kim’s career as surely as it did The Reynolds Girls’. “There was a small media backlash against The Reynolds Girls, but somehow PWL got away with it,” Harding remembered. PWL got away with it by sacrificing The Reynolds Girls and allowing them to take the blame for the cringeworthy arrogance of I’d Rather Jack.

The rumour at the time was that PWL dropped The Reynolds Girls because they had become “too big for their boots”. “There were plans to record something else but it was scrapped,” Harding confirmed, but he identified another party as the cause of the problem. “I’m told the manager of the girls (their father) was very difficult both to get on with and to do business with… don’t get me wrong – The Reynolds Girls themselves were very nice people.” Their father founded Renotone records on which to release the girls’ second and final single, Get Real. It flopped, and The Reynolds Girls disappeared. The pair have rarely commented on their brief pop career since. Linda Reynolds apparently went on to join an obscure, short-lived dance group called Hype but like both her sisters withdrew from the entertainment industry after that: Linda and Aisling’s younger sister Debbie had already quit her 80s occupation as a soap opera actress.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Nov. 27
1981
The HUMAN LEAGUE Don’t You Want Me (Virgin VS464)
MADNESS It Must Be Love (Stiff BUY134)
Gary NUMAN Love Needs No Disguise (Beggars Banquet BEG68)
STRAY CATS Little Miss Prissy (Arista SCAT5)
1989
BON JOVI (Jon Bon Jovi) Living In Sin (Mercury JOV7)
BROTHER BEYOND When Will I See You Again (Parlophone R6239)
Jason DONOVAN When You Come Back To Me (PWL PWL46)
The REYNOLDS GIRLS Get Real (Renotone RENS001)
SONIA Listen To Your Heart (Chrysalis CHS3465)
SOUL II SOUL (Jazzie B) Get A Life (10 Records TEN284)
WET WET WET Broke Away (Precious Organization JEWEL10)

Released today in 1983: Punish Me With Kisses

Wonderland SHE5

The Glove was a collaboration between Robert Smith and Steve Severin of Siouxsie of The Banshees. The Glove lasted for just one album, Blue Sunshine, from which two singles were taken, all these releases being rather overshadowed by those of Siouxsie and The Banshees and Smith’s other band, The Cure. Just after Blue Sunshine was released, The Banshees had their first Top 10 single for five years when their cover of Dear Prudence reached #3; a few weeks later, The Cure had their first Top 10 hit with The Love Cats. The Glove’s first single was their only hit 45, only making it to #52, and their album was in and out of the charts within a month.

With their Banshees colleagues Siouxsie Sioux and Budgie engaged with their project The Creatures, Smith and Severin recorded demos of songs for The Glove early in 1983. For contractual reasons Smith was unable to take the lead vocals on the commercial recordings of the songs and so a different lead singer was hired to front The Glove. The first single, Like An Animal, received disappointing reviews, but there was greater appreciation for the album Blue Sunshine: “On first hearing I yawned, but now I can’t stop playing it… titles like Punish Me With Kisses indicate much of the feel of Blue Sunshine, with images of blood, masks of grotesque make-up, of illicit tumbles between dirty sheets. Somehow though they escape the dread label ‘pretentious’, probably because the music is so addictive,” ran the review in Record Mirror. “Hear it a few times and see if it doesn’t get you in the same way. It’s really very strange.”

NEW SINGLES on sale from Nov. 18
1983
The GLOVE (Robert Smith) Punish Me With Kisses (Wonderland SHE5)
Howard JONES What Is Love? (WEA HOW2)
MADONNA Holiday (Sire W9405)
PRETENDERS 2000 Miles (Real ARE20)
1985
BRONSKI BEAT Hit That Perfect Beat (Forbidden Fruit BITE6)
Nik KERSHAW When A Heart Beats (MCA NIK9)

Released today in 1985: Final Solution

Beggars Banquet BEG143

This, the first solo single from Peter Murphy, was Single Of The Week in Melody Maker¹, but the review began rather flippantly: “There’s a free poster of the act with this one, though I’d have preferred a free Maxell tape.” Famously, Murphy was the model in the Maxell ‘Break The Sound Barrier’ television commercial from 1982, in which he was (almost) literally blown away by the listening quality afforded by the cassettes. At that time, he was a member of Bauhaus, and in an interview in Smash Hits not long after the advert first ran the group were “very keen to stress that they’re A Group. Not Peter Murphy and a backing band… at the beginning of the photo session before the interview, they make it plain that they went only group shots, no individual ones. Later, they change their minds.”

“‘I think a face can be used though.’ This is singer Peter Murphy talking now,” the Smash Hits ² piece continued. “‘You can use that sort of press to open doors. None of us see that as a problem.’ ‘But if because the visual focus all the credit is given to one person,’ chips in bassist David Jay, ‘it can lead to internal frustrations.’ ‘You can subconsciously harbour…’ Peter is probably about to say ‘jealousies’ but his voice is drowned out as the others agree loudly. For all this amicable talk, certain tensions can be detected underneath the Bauhaus surface.” Probably no wonder then that with Murphy’s extra-curricular activity (modelling, acting), Bauhaus were no more within a year of that article. His next band Dali’s car didn’t last long either (“It ended. We didn’t exactly split up, we just called it a day really.” ³) and inevitably he began a solo career.

It got off to a good start. “Is Murphy’s face his only fortune?” the Melody Maker review of Final Solution continued. (Notably, his famously sculpted cheekbones did not appear on the front of the single’s sleeve, although his extraordinary eyes filled much of the space on the reverse.) “On this evidence, certainly not… a record full of darkness and hard edges, fractured wailings and a genuine sense of mounting panic… this is hard rock at the limit.” As well as its well-received singles, his first solo album, Should The World Fail To Fall Apart, attracted good reviews, like the one from Record Mirror ⁴ which said it was “practically transcendental”: “Now this album is what I’d call proper music! You know, real songs that you can actually sing along to, unusual and well-thought-out arrangements, plus Peter Murphy singing properly for the first time in his career. True, he still has a tendency to sound as if he’s choking on own arty pomposity, but by and large his voice has matured into an immensely listenable one.”

The charge of being “arty-farty” (phrase he used himself in the Smash Hits interview) is one that has never left him. He “spent the 1980s helping the pretension police with their enquiries,” according to the introduction to a Q article about his career during the decade. ⁵ During the interview, he was “at pains to play down his undisputed title as The World’s Most Pretentious Man… [but] in many respects Peter Murphy is still trapped inside a 1981 NME cover feature.” He responded to this thusly: “I can’t see that we were any more pretentious than say, Killing Joke. I mean, we were anti-rock n’ roll and that might be pretentious but there’s pretence in every aspect of art. It’s all an act. I think what people, the press in particular, didn’t like was that there was an arrogance about us which said, We don’t need you. It was a very self-made band. And we attracted some very negative writing. Really seriously bad things were written about us.” Well, bad things would be written about a band who once recorded a song by going into the studio individually, playing whatever they liked, and then grafting it all together. ”It was a game of musical consequences, someone drew the head then the body and so on. Then we put the four bits of music together to create one disjointed, mutant piece… in that sense we weren’t pretentious because there was no self-editing, no censorship of our work, we let everyone hear what we were doing.”

¹ Sweeting, Adam. “Singles”, Melody Maker, IPC Media, 16 November 1985.
² Rimmer, Dave. “Murphy’s Law”, Smash Hits, EMAP, 28 October – 10 November 1982.
³ Murphy, Kevin. “Is There More To Life?”, Sounds, United Newspapers, 23 November 1985.
⁴ Culp, Nancy. “Albums”, Record Mirror, United Newspapers, 5 July 1986.
⁵ Deevoy, Adrian. “The Fairy Godfather of Goth”, Q, EMAP, June 1992.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Nov. 15
1985
Peter MURPHY Final Solution (Beggars Banquet BEG143)

Released today in 1987: Falling In Love

Urban URB10

Early stars of hip hop Fat Boys (Mark Morales, Damon Wimbley and Darren Robinson) were also among the most prolific acts recording music of that genre in the 1980s: they put out a new studio every year from 1984 to 1989. Robinson (aka Big Buff Love or The Human Beatbox) was a pioneer of beatboxing (oral creation of hip hop percussion sounds) and the group’s first album is considered to be an early hip hop classic. Their extrovert public personas made them perfect for MTV (they appeared in the channel’s 1985 Christmas advert), and also for crossing over into mainstream movies. They appeared as themselves in the 1985 film ‘Krush Groove’ (about the early years of Def Jam Records) and played caricatures of themselves in the movie ‘Disorderlies’ (1987). They contributed to the soundtracks of both films, and to ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master’ (1988) with the theme song Are You Ready for Freddy?.

They had some notable guests on their singles, including The Beach Boys (1987) and Chubby Checker (the latter appearing on Fat Boys’ 1988 version of his own hit, The Twist). The group split in 1991 but the popularity of their catalogue endured, despite the death of Robinson in 1985. Morales (“Prince Markie Dee”) and Wimbley (“Kool Rock-Ski”) revived the Fat Boys brand in 2008 with an official website, and a site for their clothing line was launched earlier this year.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Oct. 26
1981
CLASSIX NOUVEAUX (Sal Sol) Never Again (Liberty BP406)
1984
Nick HEYWARD Warning Sign (Arista HEY6)
HOT GOSSIP (Sinitta) Don’t Beat Around The Bush (Fanfare FAN1)
Gary NUMAN Berserker (Numa NU4)
1987
FAT BOYS Falling In Love (Urban URB10)
The COMMUNARDS Never Can Say Goodbye (London LON158)
The JESUS AND MARY CHAIN Darklands (Blanco Y Negro NEG29)
PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED (John Lydon) The Body (Virgin VS1010)
RADIO HEART featuring Gary NUMAN All Across The Nation (NBR NBR1)

Released today in 1985: Bring On The Dancing Horses

Korova KOW43

How Echo And The Bunnymen came to be formed in the late 70s is explored in our article on acts originating in Liverpool from earlier this year. Originally a trio comprising Will Sergeant (guitar), Ian McCulloch (vocals) and Les Pattinson (bass), ‘Echo’, according to legend, was their drum machine; McCulloch claimed a good a reliable drummer was hard to come by so they had decided to go without. However, they came to acquire one in the form of Pete De Freitas and his arrival, together with their joining of WEA-distributed label Korova, saw them seriously up their game. Bob Stanley also attributed a change in their direction to another influence: “They saw ‘Apocalypse Now’ and never recovered; their pretty tousled-haired singer Ian McCulloch now believed himself to be the next in line to Brando and Jim Morrison. This new psychedelia and intense self-belief led to one of 1981’s best albums Heaven Up Here, which hummed ominously throughout, like a distant overhead helicopter.”

Heaven Up Here, their second LP, was also the first of a string of Top 10 albums, which included 1984’s Ocean Rain (probably their masterpiece) and a couple of big hit singles. Pleased to be successful, they nevertheless denied they were trying to compete with commercial pop stars: “Pop’s not a dirty place to be if you’re good. You don’t have to sound like Wham! you know. It’s just that most group’s motives are really wrong,” McCulloch told Smash Hits in 1984. “For instance Culture Club are obnoxious – they’re just geared towards being #1 and that’s not great. Duran Duran I quite like. I can understand them. They just want to be the biggest teen band in the world. I just hate all those creepy types who pretend to be credible. They’re all good at creating hits, not magic.”

The Echo And The Bunnymen magic came to an end in the latter half of the 80s. Bring On The Dancing Horses (originally recorded for the ‘Pretty In Pink’ soundtrack), used to promote a compilation album of all their singles to date called Songs To Learn And Sing, was their last big hit in 1985. Their self-titled fifth album from 1987 was not received as warmly by critics as earlier efforts, and a 1988 cover of The Doors’ People Are Strange (featured in the soundtrack to the movie ‘The Lost Boys’) sat uncomfortably with their own material, although, given Bob Stanley’s observation above, it might not have been entirely out of character, especially for McCulloch as frontman. It was perhaps no surprise then that at this point he announced he was going solo. What was a surprise was that the rest Echo and The Bunnymen decided to continue without him, and hired a new singer. Sadly, before they could get a new album out, de Freitas was killed in a motorcycle accident in June 1989. McCulloch’s solo album was released a couple of months later.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Oct. 7
1983
HAIRCUT ONE HUNDRED So Tired (Polydor HC2)
1985
ANNABELLA Don’t Dance With Strangers (RCA PB40377)
ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN (Ian McCulloch) Bring On The Dancing Horses (Korova KOW43)
KING (Paul King) The Taste Of Your Tears (CBS A6618)

Released today in 1986: Contenders

Virgin VS881

The origins of Heaven 17 were explored in our article of 13 June concerning The Human League. On leaving that band, Ian Marsh and Martyn Ware formed a production company called British Electric Foundation and released a cassette called Music For Stowaways under the BEF name. Heaven 17 was formed when Marsh and Ware hired Glenn Gregory to be permanent vocalist, he having worked with Marsh on various projects since the early 70s. A BEF track (The Decline Of The West) ended up on the B-side of the first Heaven 17 single (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thing in early 1981. Despite this single’s release and the completion of a Heaven 17 LP, BEF did not come to end immediately: projects included an album for Hot Gossip (this preceded Sinitta’s association with the group by a couple of years) and another collection under the BEF brand, featuring several guest vocalists (including Gregory on one track).

Temptation, a 1983 single, released when all three members of Heaven 17 were concentrating on the band full-time, became their breakthrough and biggest hit. Featuring a prominent guest vocal from Carol Kenyon, it made the Top 10, as did the album it was taken from. They were unable to match this success however, and subsequent releases in the 80s sold progressively fewer copies. Contenders, the lead single from the fourth album, wasn’t a hit, although the follow-up Trouble nearly made the Top 50.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Oct. 6
1986
HEAVEN 17 Contenders (Virgin VS881)
The MISSION (Wayne Hussey) Stay With Me (Mercury MYTH1)

Released today in 1989: Chocolate Box

CBS ATOM8

The most prominent British teen sensations of the final two years of the 1980s were Bros, to whom more pages were devoted in Smash Hits than any other act in that period. In a little under two years they appeared on the cover on nine occasions, despite issuing some fairly unremarkable music in that period. And although their records sold well for a short time, their chart achievements were modest: they never had a #1 album and it took two attempts to get their lone #1 single I Owe You Nothing to the top of the chart. Nevertheless, legions of “Brosettes” couldn’t get enough of them.

An early incarnation of Bros was formed by twin brothers Luke Goss and Matt Goss and their friend Craig Logan when they were in their early teens at the start of the 80s. By the time they were sixteen, they were using the name Gloss and were performing in small venues in and around Lightwater, Surrey, where they had grown up. At one of these gigs they were spotted by Tom Watkins (manager of Pet Shop Boys: “When I first saw them I was absolutely bowled over. Even then – when they didn’t look good and they didn’t have a lot of money to spend on clothes or anything – they had an incredible sense of style. They were very young and inexperienced and they were just singing cover versions but I knew that they could be really big so I wanted to sign them up. But they weren’t old enough to sign their own contracts so their mum had to do it for them. We then had to wait for Craig because he was still at school. When people say I manufactured the boys, I disagree. I like to say I just brushed the dust off an already good product.”

Watkins arranged a recording deal with CBS and I Owe You Nothing was released in the school holidays in 1987, the group now called Bros (a reference to their USP, the twins, the shortened form of ‘brothers’ also happening to rhyme with their family name). The writing credit for the song, “The Brothers,” did not refer to the members of Bros or even to the twins: it was a pseudonym adopted by Watkins and producer Nicky Graham, who co-wrote much of the early material. Despite more than adequate promotion, a fashion sense fans could copy (Grolsch bottle tops on their Doc Marten shoes and other gimmicks), and – on this one occasion – a very strong song, no hit was forthcoming. A weaker but easily memorable track, When Will I Be Famous?, was issued later in the year and earned them a silver disc at the start of 1988. Then all hell broke loose: “Brosmania” arrived, and they were constantly in the press and in the Top 10 for the rest of the year. Debut album Push went multi-platinum, the ‘Big Push’ tour of the UK sold out in around forty minutes, and they embarked on a world tour (‘Global Push’) that took in Europe, Australia and Japan.

It was in Japan that Logan contracted a virus that led to his dropping out of some European tour dates and ultimately, but indirectly, his exit from the band. Missing from live shows and promotional appearances for an extended period in early 1989, rumours began circulating about the real reasons for his absence. The Goss brothers confirmed that they had fallen out with him and the press indicated that he had been paid off. The general attitude of the press towards him was that he was expendable; there was often speculation about what exactly he or Luke Goss contributed to the records. (Pace some sources, it was not Smash Hits but adult comic Viz that first christened him with the dismissive nickname ‘Ken’.) It certainly seemed that that was the case as when Bros returned after a six-month break in their release schedule in the summer of 1989, the Top 10 hits continued – and now, the songs were co-credited to Goss and Graham. But somewhere along the way the bubble had burst. Second album The Time, issued in October 1989, sold a fraction of its predecessor and was in and out of the album chart in three months. Bros barely survived into the next decade.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Sep. 25
1981
Hazel O’CONNOR Hanging Around (Albion ION1022)
THOMPSON TWINS Make Believe (T TEE3)
1989
BROS Chocolate Box (CBS ATOM8)
Debbie HARRY I Want That Man (Chrysalis CHS3369)
SINITTA Love On A Mountaintop (Fanfare FAN21)
SONIA Can’t Forget You (Chrysalis CHS3419)
THOMPSON TWINS Sugar Daddy (Warner Bros W2819)

Released today in 1989: Way Of The World

Mercury MXQ1

September 18th was the date both of Michael Hutchence’s bands were launched in the UK. In 1981, the first British INXS single was released; eight years later, the debut Max Q 7” was issued.

Max Q was short-lived project than INXS and involved Hutchence writing songs with Ollie Olsen, a post-punk band member and producer. Prior to Max Q Hutchence and Olsen had both worked on the soundtrack to the 1986 Australian movie ‘Dogs In Space’, in which Hutchence had appeared. Set in Melbourne’s experimental ‘Little Band’ era in the late 1970s, in the film Hutchence plays Sam, the drug-addicted frontman of the fictitious band the movie is named after. The soundtrack album became hard to come by as it had a very limited release on CD and company responsible folded not long after.

Hutchence fronted Max Q and sang lead, backed by other contacts of Olsen’s from the real-life Melbourne post-punk scene.

NEW SINGLES on sale from Sep. 18
1981
The ASSOCIATES A (Fiction FICS13)
Billy IDOL Mony Mony (Chrysalis CHS2543)
INXS (Michael Hutchence) Just Keep Walking (RCA RCA89)
MADNESS Shut Up (Stiff BUY126)
The POLICE Invisible Sun (A&M AMS8164)
SPARKS Funny Face (Why-Fi WHY4)
TOYAH Thunder In The Mountains (Safari SAFE38)
1989
Kate BUSH The Sensual World (EMI EM102)
Holly JOHNSON Heaven’s Here (MCA MCA1365)
MAX Q (Michael Hutchence) Way of the World (Mercury MXQ1)
Kirsty MacCOLL Innocence (Virgin KMA3)
The PRIMITIVES (Tracy Tracy) Secrets (Lazy PB43173)
WET WET WET Sweet Surrender (Precious Organization JEWEL9)